Category Archives: Literature

Reading Against the Novel

Posted on June 27, 2024 by Luke Ford

Tim Parks writes for the July 18, 2024 edition of NYBooks.com: In hundreds of essays and reviews, the nineteenth-century lawyer and judge James Fitzjames Stephen considered the novel’s effects on society at a time when it was becoming the dominant … Continue reading →

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The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

Posted on June 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Mark McGurl writes in this 2011 book: …the creative writing program produces… a literature aptly suited to a programmatic society. …Postwar American literature provides endless testimony, for starters, of the agonizing importance of the institution of the family in making … Continue reading →

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Larry McMurtry’s Struggle Against Anti-Gentile Prejudice

Posted on January 23, 2024 by Luke Ford

Here’s an excerpt from the new biography, Larry McMurtry: A Life by Tracy Daugherty: She [McMurtry’s literary agent Dorothea Oppenheimer] gave [Editor Michael Korda] an earful about how East Coast reviewers just didn’t get McMurtry though to be fair he … Continue reading →

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The Orwellian Life

Posted on November 7, 2023 by Luke Ford

Colin Burrow writes in the Oct. 5, 2023 issue of the LROB: The Orwellian person seeks surgically to separate himself from every person who materially or emotionally supports him, but then finds he can’t actually live that way. You leave … Continue reading →

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Wellness by Nathan Hill

Posted on October 20, 2023 by Luke Ford

Daphne Merkin writes for The Atlantic: A Worthy Heir to David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon In Wellness, Nathan Hill recounts a love story, but also much, much more. …That Nathan Hill comes charging onto this depleted fictional scene with … Continue reading →

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